John Wick Hex

PC

Takes a series renowned for the brutal fluidity of its fight scenes and turns it into a strategy game

Developer Bithell Games

Publisher Good Shepherd Entertainment

Format PC

Release Out now

There have been many attempts to adapt action movies into videogames over the years, and most have taken the obvious routes, resulting in firstperson shooters and thirdperson brawlers that largely fail to capture the thrills of big-screen violence. John Wick: Hex follows a different path. Bithell Games takes a series renowned for the brutal fluidity of its fight scenes and turns it into a strategy game. It’s a fascinatingly leftfield approach which displaces the fantasy – not so much about playing the hero as the team behind their stunts, putting the player in a role somewhere between fight choreographer and editor.

The campaign is split up into tightly contained maps, each of them equivalent to a single action sequence. As you steer Wick from point to point, directing him to put a bullet in this head or that, a timeline runs across the top of the screen. Each action is assigned a value, measured out in tenths of a second. A single step takes just under half a second; squeezing off a shot is closer to two. In the moments between, as you weigh up your options, everything freezes. Like Superhot before it, this is a game which understands the real superpower of any action hero: their talent for snap decisions, planning, reacting and revising all inside a single instant. In films, that’s the choreographer at work. Here, it’s you.

Meanwhile, like an editor, you’re constantly playing the timeline, arranging actions like frames of video. Say an enemy goon has Wick in their sights. Every enemy has their own track on the timeline, in this case showing you have 0.8 seconds until their shot gets overlaid onto whatever move you’ve chosen, interrupting it. That doesn’t give Wick enough of a window to draw on her and return fire, but he can throw his gun to stun her, buying him a couple of seconds here but setting up a long moment of dead air down the line, when he inevitably has to scoop up the flung weapon.

In one-on-one combat, these decisions are fairly trivial. Wick is a little quicker than his foes, so it’s just a case of ensuring you act first. But of course, no good John Wick fight scene pits him against a single opponent, and the real game kicks in when he’s surrounded on all sides. So if he’s tangled in a fistfight, and two guards have just emerged through a door pistols raised, it becomes a question of priorities. Do you have time to finish this fight and duck behind cover before the bullets start flying? Or should you sidestep the brawl and take the shooters on first?

In all this, there’s one move which you’ll come to value more than any other, and which is the key to understanding Hex’s entire approach to combat: the takedown. It’s a close-quarters special move, dealing more damage than any other, but it’s the momentum you’ll really treasure. You can select an adjacent tile for Wick to end the move on, putting him closer to the next enemy or behind cover, and keeping him in constant motion so incoming shots are less likely to land.

This is invaluable, creating a smooth transition from one enemy to the next. But it also gobbles up Focus, a resource you’ll be managing almost as carefully as time. Focus lets you pull off more elaborate stunts: combat rolls, sidestep dodges and melee specials. When the bar is full, Wick is essentially invincible. Let it run out, and your options are severely limited. It takes just a second to recoup – 1.1 seconds, to be precise – but even that can be hard to find with multiple foes bearing down on you. And don’t even get us started on the time it takes to bandage a wound and refill Wick’s health bar; those three seconds seem to stretch into infinity.

In Hex, standing still equals death. There are hit percentages if you’re looking for them, but really the game runs on action-movie logic. Pushing one henchman by the throat towards your shooter generally means they’ll miss every shot, even if you’re standing right next to them. It’s a little hard to adjust to if you’re coming from traditional tactics games such as X-COM, but it does make perfect sense for the source material.

The problem is that the game is playing editor and choreographer alongside you, and it’s harder to forgive its mistakes than your own. Animations are a little stiff, Wick shuffling along like his suit is too tight around the joints. Watching him crab-scuttle past an assailant makes it hard to buy intuitively into the dodge system. We all know Keanu can dodge bullets, but it’d be nice for the game to make some attempt to convince you.

This is just one example where Hex is strangely rigid. There’s the way brawlers will politely retreat after delivering a blow – it’s a blessed relief in the moment, giving Wick chance to recover and retaliate, but it punctures the fantasy a little. The difficulty your camera can have navigating the tight level geometry. And, most of all, the gradually emerging sense of a ‘correct’ way to play, which ignores many of the tools at your disposal.

We eventually cast aside our chains of somersaults and weapon-flinging gun fu – play that always kept the end-of-level action replay in mind – in favour of a more conventional approach of popping out of cover, doubletapping the nearest enemy, and ducking back to break line of sight, only occasionally dipping into the full vocabulary of violence Wick has to hand and breaking out a push or parry. It’s telling that the game includes an ‘Expedited’ mode, with a five-second timer constantly nudging you to the next move like a chess clock. It feels best when you’re making snap decisions, the action moving along with a satisfying pop, pop, pop rhythm that echoes the films – but playing this way jettisons a lot of what makes this such a novel adaptation, effectively turning Hex back into the kind of action game you’d expect from the source material.